Governing the World

How global government has evolved from utopian concept to failed ideal

Mark Mazower, the Ira D. Wallach Professor of World Order Studies, chairs the Department of History. An Oxford graduate, he concentrates on modern Greece, 20th-century Europe and international history. His books include Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century and Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe, which won the L.A. Times Book Prize for History in 2009. His most recent book is Governing the World: The History of an Idea, from which the following excerpt is taken.

Governing the World is a landmark study of the idea of world governance from idealistic concept to often benighted reality. Nineteenth-century internationalists imagined “a movement of cooperation among nations and their peoples,” as Mazower writes, with thinkers as diverse as Jeremy Bentham (who invented the word “international”), Karl Marx and Giuseppe Mazzini contributing sketched-out theories. The 20th century saw real-world attempts at global government in the shape of the League of Nations and its successor, the UN, but the geopolitical version of “cosmi charmony,” long dreamed of, never materialized. In the closing section of Governing the World, Mazower studies the outlines and fissures of this failed ideal.

Rose Kernochan ’82 Barnard

That international institutions may not be internally democratic in their workings has been known for some time and does not appear particularly surprising. They are, after all, chiefly executive bureaucracies, and mostly their most powerful members like them that way. International legislatures have never lived up to the hope of nineteenth-century internationalists, and as the fate of the European Parliament and the UN General Assembly demonstrate, they are unlikely to make much impact on the twenty-first.

What does seem novel, in historical terms, is the collapsing importance of the public bodies that give national sovereignty meaning and the way that organs of international government and regulation have come to assail the internal legitimacy, capacity, and cohesion of individual states. They are not actually turning democracies into dictatorships — few people believe in dictatorships anymore — although the turn to Putin in Russia suggests such a drift is possible. But they are certainly hollowing out representative institutions and curtailing their capacity to act. Bodies that were once designed to foster sovereignty are now recast to curtail it. And this is not merely the curtailing of autonomy that is always implicit when states decide to join international organizations and respect their rules; it is the consequence of major changes in those rules themselves. “The pattern of influence and decision-making that rules the world has an increasingly marginal connection with sovereignty,” notes Koskenniemi in a recent article.

This multifaceted erosion of sovereignty is a momentous change that has been based upon a radical alteration in attitudes to the state and bureaucracy over the past thirty years. In its various nineteenth-century incarnations, after all, internationalism was preeminently a movement to restore sovereign power to the peoples of the world, and those who governed in their name. Its approach to the nation-state and its institutions was almost entirely positive. The originary moment of 1919 saw the goal of the League of Nations as a world made “safe for democracy,” a goal understood — in an imperial idiom — as a society of sovereign polities. After 1945, the United Nations promoted the creed of sovereignty more widely, more adamantly, and more deeply. Nazism’s assault on the sovereignty of small nations was repudiated and in Europe democracy was restored; colonialism’s denial of sovereign rights around the world was also castigated. The state was rendered sacrosanct, international boundaries were mutually recognized in Asia, Africa, and Europe, and the meaning of democracy itself was broadened to “promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom” (in the words of the UN Charter). International institutions enabled states to survive and flourish, and as civil services expanded rapidly, states enabled their citizens.

In the construction of this system of sovereign nations, no power played a more important role than the United States. Washington never had complete control of the process, of course, and there were compromises on all sides. After 1945, welfare states grew faster and economic nationalizations went farther across the globe than American policymakers might have wished, for example, and trade liberalization proceeded more slowly. But these points of disagreement and tension were not decisive. The American Century at its apogee coincided with the heyday of national planning in the Third World and the welfare state in Europe. American foundations funded roads, medical services, libraries, and schools, and American social sciences — from midcentury macroeconomics to modernization theory — provided the legitimation for this expansion of state capacity around the world. Countries gradually became reintegrated in a global trade network, but capital movements remained restricted, and in general people made money from producing and exchanging goods rather than from money itself. As late as 1971, it was assumed that conditionality would not work if demanded by the IMF since client states would permit no interference in their internal affairs.

And then, between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s, all of this changed, as the United States ceased to support a version of liberalism embedded in strong domestic institutions. Confronted with an unforeseen challenge to reshape the rules of international order in a way that gave priority to the needs of the developing world — the Third World’s New International Economic Order — the United States reacted by moving against the old midcentury conception of the enabling state on several fronts: international human rights activism saw the state as tyrant and mobilized global civil society against it; the World Bank and the IMF exploited the crisis-prone character of the new financialization of the world to redraw the boundaries of public and private sectors in vulnerable debtor countries. As governance replaced government, welfare nets frayed, and income and wealth inequality rose sharply. Formal structures disintegrated and informal economies — black markets, smuggling, and crime networks — flourished, leaving only the ubiquitous concept of the “failed state” itself as implicit acknowledgment that states really were rather important. In turn, the threat of state failure rationalized invasions and occupations that returned swaths of Africa and parts of the Balkans to rule by international executive. This was in no sense a reversion to the emancipatory perspectives of mid-nineteenth-century internationalists but rather the crafting of a “leaner, meaner state” in one country after another across the world, dissolving society in the name of the individual, using international organizations as the handmaidens and new paradigms — the efficient market hypothesis, the Responsibility to Protect — to provide intellectual rationalization.

If the corrosive impact of this process on the idea of sovereigntyitself has not much bothered mainstream American observers, it is partly because it has been moralized and turned into something virtuous, and partly because it has happened less there than anywhere else. The United States remains the exceptional power, able more than any other over the past half century to exempt itself from otherwise universally binding international commitments and obligations, its untrammeled sovereignty jealously guarded by Congress. Combining the language of universalism with the status of the exception has allowed American values and influence to spread at relatively little internal cost in terms of policy constraint. And this freedom has actually increased with the shift from a world of formal treaty obligations — a world that had always made Congress unhappy — to one of informal rules and norms, which the United States itself has been well positioned to craft. Only in the fears on the American right of eroding sovereignty and the implausible specter of world government do we get a glimmering of what the stakes may be when the American era finally ends.

Beyond the borders of the United States, on the other hand, it has been far more self-evident that international institutions and norms have developed into means of curtailing sovereignty rather than enhancing it, trends that could not but affect the standing of international bodies themselves and undercut their ability to command continued support. The real-world challenges mount around us in the shape of climate change, financial instability, poverty, crime, and disease. With the WTO’s Doha Round paralyzed and the World Bank chastened, the IMF incapable of helping to rectify the global imbalances that threaten the world economy, and no single agency able to coordinate the response to global warming, the institutions of international governance stand in urgent need of renovation. Yet the fundamental nineteenth-century insight that effective internationalism rests on effective nationalism remains pertinent. Voters around the world still see their primary allegiance to their national state rather than to any large polity, a fact that reflects the continuing role of the state as primary purveyor of public goods but that many international bodies are loath to acknowledge.

Now we are on the verge of a new era, and as Western predominance approaches an end, the prognosticators speculate on what will come next. Some American commentators seem particularly anxious at their country’s possible loss of influence. But taking a more detached view and in more formal terms, the mere fact that some states are gaining strength as others lose it says little. And so far as China in particular is concerned, it has much to gain and little of any consequence to lose from participating in a system designed to favor leading nations. Like any great power, it will use these institutions to further its own ends, but like its predecessors it will not always prevail. Thus there is no reason to think that the shift in the global balance need of itself mark the end of the international institutions established in the Anglo-American ascendancy.

In the ongoing atomization of society, citizens and classes have both vanished as forces for change and given way to a world of individuals.

Indeed from the perspective of the question of sovereignty, positive as well as negative consequences may emerge from the decline in American and European financial and political clout. As long ago as 1995, the British political economist Susan Strange argued that “the only way to remove the present, hegemonic, do-nothing veto on better global governance, is to build, bit by bit, a compelling opposition based on European-Japanese cooperation, but embracing Latin Americans, Asians and Africans.” The prospective lineup now looks different but the point remains valid. The rising powers, China above all, have little liking for the IMF, at least in its older incarnation, and attach much greater importance to the idea of preserving sovereignty and some space for domestic political discretion. If their influence grows, the institutions the United States created may be brought back under new direction to the principles that originally animated them. A broader array of voices and perspectives will enrich the rather rigid forms of economic thinking that have predominated since the 1970s.

Getting the institutional architecture right is the subject of endless position papers and reform proposals. But there are two kinds of more fundamental change that will need to take place too. In the current crisis, politicians have essentially acted as underwriters, essential but subordinate to the dictates of communities of financial market makers they hesitate to contradict. More generally, the politicians have become policymakers, who listen in the first place to private interests and their lobbyists and try to adjudicate among them. Time will show whether they are any longer capable of governing. If that fails to happen, the responsibility will not be theirs alone. One of the reasons for the midcentury popularity of the state and sovereignty was that both had proved themselves in extreme circumstances. Twentieth-century total wars were fought by states that mobilized entire societies around shared perils and experiences. By creating models ofequity, solidarity, and sacrifice, they transformed public attitudes in ways that endured into peacetime. Without a comparable transformation in our own views about the nature of government, the public good and the role of the state, without our developing a new kind of faith in our own collective capacity to shape the future, there is no real incentive for our politicians to change. They may not be trusted by their electorates — polls show levels of trust plumbing new lows — but they have no reason to care so long as this lack of trust does not translate into mobilization, resistance, and sustained pressure for reform.

To the nineteenth-century internationalists with whom this book began, the future conjured up a new dispensation for mankind, a dispensation they looked forward to with a confidence based upon their control over a universe of facts: hence Bentham’s vision of a perfect system of law that depended on the accumulation of all useful knowledge, or Karl Marx’s path to a communist future through the history of capitalism’s past. To twentieth-century institution builders from [Jan] Smuts to [Franklin D.] Roosevelt, from Robert Jackson to Walt Rostow, the future could be planned and tackled with foresight on behalf of entire communities and nations, perhaps even for the world as a whole. Today, when the primacy of the fact is challenged by the Web — a recent article hails the fact’s death — the future, more important than ever, has been privatized, monetized, and turned into a source of profit. An entire corporate sector is dedicated to commodifying and modeling it; our financial markets in general take the future as the determinant of present values in a way that simply was not true a century ago. No one now feels the burden of an essential but unknowable future more acutely than the stockbroker and trader. But this money-driven individualistic future has crowded out an older vision of what the public good might look like.

In the ongoing atomization of society, citizens and classes have both vanished as forces for change and given way to a world of individuals, who come together as consumers of goods or information, and who trust the Internet more than they do their political representatives or the experts they watch on television. Governing institutions today have lost sight of the principle of politics rooted in the collective values of a res publica, even as they continue to defend the “civilization of capital.” As for the rituals of international life, these are now well established. The world’s heads of state flock annually to the United Nations General Assembly. There are discussions of reform and grandiose declarations of global targets, which mostly go unmet. Politicians, journalists, bankers, and businessmen make their pilgrimage to the heavily guarded Alpine precinct of Davos, seeking to confirm through this triumph of corporate sponsorship that a global ruling elite exists and that they belong to it. Our representatives continue to hand over power to experts and self-interested self-regulators in the name of efficient global governance while a skeptical and alienated public looks on. The idea of governing the world is becoming yesterday’s dream.

From GOVERNING THE WORLD: THE HISTORY OF AN IDEA by Mark Mazower, copyright (c) 2012 by Mark Mazower. Used by permission of The Penguin Press, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.